Saturday, November 10, 2012

No matter how many times this point is made, it seems to get lost in budget
discussions. Our budget problem is about
health care costs, and it's a problem the private sector shares (so privatizing
health care doesn't solve the problem unless you believe, contrary to the
evidence, that this would reduce cost growth):

That’s all of the federal government’s spending in three graphs. The top
graph is health care, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
The middle graph is Social Security. And then there’s literally everything else:
Defense, education, infrastructure, food safety, R&D, farm subsidies, the FBI,
etc.

What these three charts tell you is simple: It’s all about health care. Spending
on Social Security is expected to rise, but not particularly quickly. Spending
on everything else is actually falling. It’s health care that contains most all
of our future deficit problems. And the situation is even worse than it looks on
this graph: Private health spending is racing upwards even faster than public
health spending ...

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'It’s All About Health Care'

No matter how many times this point is made, it seems to get lost in budget
discussions. Our budget problem is about
health care costs, and it's a problem the private sector shares (so privatizing
health care doesn't solve the problem unless you believe, contrary to the
evidence, that this would reduce cost growth):

That’s all of the federal government’s spending in three graphs. The top
graph is health care, including Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.
The middle graph is Social Security. And then there’s literally everything else:
Defense, education, infrastructure, food safety, R&D, farm subsidies, the FBI,
etc.

What these three charts tell you is simple: It’s all about health care. Spending
on Social Security is expected to rise, but not particularly quickly. Spending
on everything else is actually falling. It’s health care that contains most all
of our future deficit problems. And the situation is even worse than it looks on
this graph: Private health spending is racing upwards even faster than public
health spending ...